Digital Realty breaks ground on new Western Sydney datacentre
Digital Realty APAC CFO Krupal Raval and Minister for Mental Health, Women and Ageing Tanya Davies at the new datacentre site.
San Francisco-based company Digital Realty has broken ground on what will soon be the organisation's SYD11 datacentre in Western Sydney.
The SYD11 datacentre, which is expected to be completed in around 12 months, is Digital Realty's fourth build and fifth datacentre in Australia, with one added via acquisition in 2013. It will be the company's third datacentre in New South Wales, with the other two taking up space in Victoria.
Once fully operational, the facility being built in Erskine Park, approximately 40 kilometres from Sydney's CBD, will be a 14MW facility across a total of 16,360 square metres -- roughly double the size of the SYD10 datacentre.
Speaking with ZDNet, Peter Adcock, vice president of Design and Construction in APAC for Digital Realty, explained that the new facility will be connected to the company's existing facility also in Erskine Park, providing customers with a "connected campus", which is a way the company brings the critical datacentre and network elements together under a single, secure environment.
"Across the other datacentres in Australia at the moment, they're north of 95 percent occupancy, so there's a need to build for more real estate," Adcock added.
"Once we have customers that are settled into SYD10, they want to be able to grow seamlessly into SYD11 -- so that's driving a lot of it.
"Power and land pushed us out to Western Sydney. It's an ideal location, and it's got a lot of logistics reasons behind it as well."
Digital Realty APAC CFO Krupal Raval said his organisation is looking forward to further boost its footprint down under to better serve its growing customer base.
According to Raval, business in Sydney and Melbourne has grown by 81 percent over the last three years, noting the growth is off the back of Digital Realty's hyperscale customers, which includes the local presence of IBM -- the company's largest customer globally.
Facebook, Microsoft, and Google are also among the company's customers.
"Australia is exactly parallel to the rest of the world in terms of the tremendous amount of growth. Although we have many different verticals that we serve, the biggest individual sub-sector that we serve is the cloud providers," Raval said.
SYD11 is expected to bring to market the latest advancements in datacentre design and energy efficiency, Adcock explained, noting that Digital Realty has a 10-year record of achieving an availability in excess of 99.999 percent. He said it's important to get the design right from the start and make it future-proof.
Currently, the company owns and operates 145 properties across 33 global metropolitan areas. In addition to its Sydney and Melbourne presence, Digital Realty's APAC network also includes datacentres in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Osaka.
Founded in the early 2000s, Digital Realty went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2004. It also recently announced the $7.6 billion acquisition of real estate investment trust company DuPont Fabros which at the close of the deal will see Digital Reality valued at around $34 billion.